Tchaikovsky Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture Tchaikovsky softly evokes Friar Laurence and the chants of the cloister in opening his Romeo and Juliet Overture. After modulations and suspensions (notes that may clash but then give way) suggest Romeo’s early feelings about “love [being] a smoke raised the fume of sighs,” Read more…
Witold Lutosławski Little Suite (Mala suita) Fife (Allegretto) Hurrah Polka (Vivace) Son (Andante) Dance (Allegro molto) Lutosławski’s Little Suite, with its infectious energy and folk-inspired themes, was one of the most frequently performed works in 1950s Poland, and its melodies are drawn the town of Machowa, an hour’s drive east Read more…
Margaret Bonds Montgomery Variations Program Notes Margaret Bonds came from a middle-class Chicago family. She showed early talent as a pianist and composer, and studied with Florence Price as a teenager. Her studies at Chicago’s Northwestern University yielded both undergraduate and graduate degrees. Near the end of her studies, she Read more…
Strauss Fledermaus Overture Program Notes Strauss’s Fledermaus has a convoluted plot with many comedic opportunities. Prince Orlofsky is throwing a ball (in the original version it was to be a New Year’s party), and there are all sorts of ploys at hand. The character Falke is trying to visit revenge Read more…
Strauss Death and Transfiguration Program Notes Three themes of the Romantic era are love, nature or death, and the Romantics focused on creating a personal and subjective response in the audience, to have them feel what they felt. Stunningly, Strauss was 24 years old when he began this piece. (It Read more…
Mussorgsky Pictures at an Exhibition Program Notes Like other members of The Mighty Handful (Rimsky-Korsakoff, Borodin, et al), Modest Mussorgsky aimed to create a Russian musical sound. As a very young child, he’d been drawn to the piano, musically retelling his nanny’s Russian tales. In St. Petersburg, he met composers Cui Read more…
Kent Kennan Night Soliloquy Program Notes Kent Kennan composed little, if anything, in his last 65 years. Yet Howard Hanson recorded some of his music with the Eastman-Rochester Orchestra for Mercury Records, and he probably received encouragement to compose more. Instead, he concentrated on his teaching, which for most of Read more…
John Adams The Chairman Dances Program Notes It’s an amazing thing to see “Nixon in China” in the theater. Set in 1972, the opera is about the three days Nixon spent in Beijing, along with Pat Nixon, Secretary of State William Rogers, and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, who had Read more…
Anthony Mosakowski Concert Overture Program Notes It’s always exciting to introduce a piece of music to an audience for the first time, especially a work like Anthony Mosakowski’s Concert Overture, with its great energy, artistry, sense of melody and craft. The Overture, for an orchestra of single winds, varied percussion, harp, piano Read more…
Ann Wyeth McCoy A Christmas Fantasy Program Notes A young Ann Wyeth composed this piece and, aged 19, entered it in a competition for young composers held by the Philadelphia Orchestra. It was premiered the next December, conducted by music director Leopold Stokowski. Ann’s father N.C. Wyeth first came from Read more…